Daily Archives: August 22, 2017

DALLAS — A sniper killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter march on Thursday night and in the aftermath, the peaceful protesters downtown say they were wrongly blamed for the massacre.Dallas chief of police David Brown said Friday morning that the gunman, who has was unaffiliated with any group, said he wanted to kill white police officers. Before this was known, fingers were pointed in all directions over who was to blame for the massacre.Hundreds of people of all races were marching down Lamar Street between Commerce and Main, mere blocks from Dealey Plaza where President Kennedy was assassinated, when gunfire erupted around 9 p.m. Police and eyewitnesses say two snipers began firing from the top floor of a parking garage.“Pop, pause, pop, pause. Then you see the first two officers go down,” said Jamal Johnson, who attended the evening’s rally and remained behind among bewildered protesters and gathering bystanders waiting for answers.Over the next several hours, twelve total police officers would be shot, in addition to two civilians, including a mother who was shielding her children. Seven officers remain injured. Both civilians are expected to be OK.Just before 3 a.m., one of the suspects died after a long standoff. During negotiations, he said, “The end is near.” The man was eventually killed by police, who used a robotic explosive device.“We cornered one suspect, and we tried to negotiate for several hours,” Brown recalled. “We had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, and we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. Other options would have exposed the officers to grave danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of the detonating the bomb.”

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In 1971, Manuel Elizalde, a government official in the Philippines and crony of Ferdinand and Immelda Marcos, announced the discovery of a previously lost “stone age tribe” of indigenous people on the island of Mindanao. Known as the Tasaday, the tribe became overnight celebrities, especially when it was revealed that they didn’t even have a word for “war” and were pacifist cave dwellers. They became the poster children for railing against the decadence of modern civilization. As it turned out, however, the Tasaday were a hoax.

Linguists first became suspicious when it emerged that this group of supposed cave dwellers had a word for “roof.” Then, in 1986, a Swiss reporter discovered that the Tasaday weren’t living “like our ancestors” at all, but rather in typical houses in which they dressed in blue jeans and T-Shirts. Elizalde had convinced some members of local tribes to pretend to belong to the tribe in exchange for money. The villagers never saw any support and in the early 1980s Elizalde fled with (reportedly) $35 million of funds ear-marked for minority groups and a harem of teenage girls.

Recent anthropological work has suggested that while some of the local tribes in the region were more isolated than others, there was no “stone age” group that was untouched by the modern world.In the past three hundred years, as the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and others trawled the globe colonizing the world and exploring areas that were previously unknown (to them), they have often discovered groups of people who seem to them to be a throwback to the prehistoric world. While the majority of European propaganda caricatures foreign groups as dangerous savages to be subjugated, they were also described as “pristine tribes” as noble, simple, fierce, spiritual, and somehow more authentically human than those of us corrupted by “civilization.”

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It doesn’t take courage to denounce Nazism. Moreover, it appears many of the people incessantly proclaiming how anti-Nazi they are, happen to be the same folks who have the most to answer for when it comes to all sorts of transgressions against the world over the past couple of decades. That said, I’ll give my my quick two cents on the Nazi, white supremacist hysteria currently being amplified by the corporate media.The general proclivity to obsess about how one’s group, whether it be a nation, political tribe, or race/religion is superior to all others represents such an immature and unconscious way of seeing the world, it’s really hard for me to believe so many people still see reality through such a lens. This type of thinking tends to attract very insecure people. People who cannot look at themselves individually and be proud of the person they see. As such, they scurry around looking for a group with an established superiority myth which they can then latch themselves onto in order to feel better about themselves.The good news when it comes to Nazism/white supremacy, at least here in the U.S., is that most people appear to be at least conscious enough not to fall for the most basic and primal type of tribalism — i.e., finding a race-based superiority cult attractive. In contrast, the more nuanced superiority cults, such as those based on mindless nationalism or political identity, are far more entrenched here at home, and present a much greater danger to our future.

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A bed and breakfast in Perthshire has dressed up several of its hens in high-visibility jackets to protect them when they cross the road.Glenshieling House on Hatton Road, Blairgowrie, is taking the precaution to keep safe a few of the more adventurous of its 14 hens.The bed and breakfast’s owner, Louise Lennox, has also seen an opportunity to raise brand awareness, daubing the vests with the words “Glenshieling House Girl” and its phone number.She told STV News: “I have 14 hens for my B&B, which help out with the breakfast side of things, along with a cockerel.”They normally stay in the garden but a couple of them like to go for a wee wander down the path and sometimes across the road.”I just thought it would be a little bit of fun and would also keep the hens safe, so I put some vests on the wanderers.”

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When a baby cries at night, exhausted parents scramble to figure out why. He’s hungry. Wet. Cold. Lonely. But now, a Harvard scientist offers more sinister explanation: The baby who demands to be breastfed in the middle of the night is preventing his mom from getting pregnant again.This devious intention makes perfect sense, says evolutionary biologist David Haig, who describes his idea in Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. Another baby means having to share mom and dad, so babies are programmed to do all they can to thwart the meeting of sperm and egg, the theory goes.

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If classroom excuses are to be believed, dogs around the world are responsible for eating entire forests of paper in the form of homework every year.Japanese Twitter user @asuka1216na5 has had the same problem but, instead of homework, their salary was destroyed. In the photo, several tens of thousands of yen can be seen ripped to shreds, contrasting with the butter-wouldn’t-melt innocent face of the canine perpetrator.